The Magic Hopping Cylinder of Douma

The final report of the OPCW on the Douma incident, published Friday, focuses on the two chlorine cylinders found atop two houses in Douma. One of them ended up in a bed. Reproduced above is a diagram from the OPCW report, embellished with Bellingdog’s helpful interpretation.

Allegedly, after crashing through a concrete ceiling, the cylinder bounced off the concrete floor as if it were a trampoline, landing neatly in bed. One would almost have expected it to have tucked itself in. The Russians who investigated the scene prior to the OPCW noticed yellow-discolored drag marks on the stairs leading up to the apartment with the cylinder.

But the OPCW simply treats this as an unsolved mystery. Incredibly, they note that the floor is undamaged where the cylinder presumably struck. In other words, they expect us to believe that the cylinder, after plowing right through concrete ceiling, failed to even cause a mark on the floor below, before hopping up at an angle to fall into bed. With respect to the other cylinder, which came to rest on an upstairs patio beneath a hole in the ceiling, they cite an analysis — likely the one generated by the highly dubious Bellingcat group that was published in the New York Times — to conclude that evidence is “consistent” with the possibility that the cylinder was dropped from above, presumably by a Syrian helicopter. But the positioning of this cylinder is also highly dubious, as it appears to have poked a hole in the patio floor larger than the diameter of the cylinder — yet failed to fall through the hole.

Although the OPCW notes that a cylinder very similar to the two found on the roofs was observed in a Douma weapons lab used by the jihadis, it states that the ones found on rooftops were of slightly different shape and had been modified with a harness and tail fins. Evidently, these modifications could have been added by the jihadis, to give the impression that the cylinders had been used as aerial bombs, and to aid transport of the cylinders. Remarkably (or perhaps not so remarkably), the OPCW did not bother to test this cylinder to determine whether it contained chlorine.

The more important point is that the OPCW offers no clear explanation for the 3 dozen or so victims — many seemingly poisoned to death — photographed in the lower floors of one of the houses. What is clear to people capable of simple logic is that the chlorine cylinder several floors up had nothing to do with their deaths. I have enumerated my reasons previously.

To summarize, chlorine is a respiratory toxin, not a nerve gas, and unless you are exposed to high concentrations for a number of minutes, it doesn’t kill you. Chlorine is highly irritating, and people will immediately run out of a chlorine cloud to save themselves. Which is why, in industrial accidents in which a great many tons of chlorine gas have been released, the vast majority of victims have survived. And yet doctors in Douma’s only hospital saw no victims of chlorine gas poisoning that day, nor could any be found when independent journalists went to Douma a few days after the incident. (The White Helmets, however, obligingly provided the OPCW with reports of such poisonings.) Furthermore, the cylinder several stories above was of modest size, and it is questionable whether it could have killed anyone below, if they weren’t already in a coma — particularly since the gas could have escaped through the hole in the ceiling and the windows in the building. When the Germans experimented with chlorine as a chemical weapon in WWI, they literally released thousands of tons at a time — and even then the results were insufficiently lethal to justify continued use of chlorine as a military weapon.

The evident implication — which the OPCW not surprisingly fails to draw — is that these unfortunate victims, mostly women and children, were killed execution style by the jihadis for use as props in the Douma production they had arranged for Western audiences.

And there is another reason why we know chlorine did not kill theses victims. Chlorine is severely irritating to the eyes, causing “injected sclera” in medical lingo.

Yet victims photographed in the lower stories, although many were foaming at the mouth and hence seemed to have been poisoned, did not have bloodshot eyes — they evidently were killed by a different poison. And many of the victims appeared to be foaming at the mouth — not a characteristic sign of chlorine poisoning. Even the OPCW noted that the photos of the bodies suggested near instant death, not consistent with chlorine poisoning. We will not learn what poison was used, because the OPCW, for reasons not clarified, chose not to exhume and autopsy the victims. (It would indeed have been inconvenient if such autopsies revealed that chlorine was not the cause of death, and the OPCW was forced to report this.) Since the OPCW has already ruled out the presence of nerve agents, and did not find evidence for other toxic gasses (other than chlorine) at the scene, this effectively rules out the possibility that the victims were gassed by Assad’s forces. Most likely, the victims were murdered by the jihadis at a different site, and then carried into the building.

Is it credible that Jaysh al-Islam, the jihadi group which controlled Douma prior to its recovery by the Syrian army, could have done something so barbaric? Judge for yourself:

Of course, the elephant in the room here is that it would make no sense whatever for Assad’s forces to have dropped chlorine on Douma — they were on the brink of winning the war, and the use of chlorine would accomplish nothing other than to give Syria’s Western foes an excuse to pummel it. (In addition to which, the magic hopping cylinder appears to have been an extremely clumsy plant by the jihadis; in which case the other cylinder almost surely was a plant as well, even if slightly more credibly positioned.)

Since we already know that the film of “gas victims” in the Douma hospital was a fraudulent production by the White Helmets — as even a reporter for the BBC has recently acknowledged — it should come as no surprise that the scene of the alleged chlorine attack was likewise staged by the jihadis.

By failing to make it clear that the murder victims photographed in Douma had not been killed by the chlorine canister above them — and that indeed every aspect of the “gas attack” on Douma appears to have been staged by the jihadis and their White Helmet propagandists — the OPCW is effectively acting as a accomplice to the jihadi butchers. This dereliction is enabling the media to run with headlines like:

But bear in mind that the founding President of the OPCW, Jose Bustani, was fired — owing to the machinations of John Bolton — after he refused to believe our Deep State’s fairy tales about Saddam’s WMDs.

As you will recall, a coalition of the UK, France, and the US launched over a hundred cruise missiles into Syria in retaliation for Assad’s “brutal gassing” of Douma. When are May, Macron, and Trump being sent to the Hague for their war crimes trials?

The Douma episode is just the “canary in the coal mine” alerting us to the fact that the entire narrative of “the butcher Assad gassing his own people” is a hoax, intended to justify the support of Western governments for the brutal assault of sociopathic jihadis on the people of Syria — as much previous evidence suggests.

This hoax was enabled by the fact that the Western media accepted as gospel truth the lies and stage plays of the White Helmets, a group organized by Western neocons that has served as a propaganda arm for the jihadi butchers. Honest and courageous reporters on the ground in Syria, who attempted to alert us to the gross, criminal fraud that was being perpetrated on us, have been invariably been derided as dupes and “Assad apologists” by the Western mainstream media.

The only reason why the truth has gradually emerged on the Douma episode is that the Syrian army was able to secure Douma shortly after the jihadis and the White Helmets had staged their latest fraud — enabling independent journalists to investigate the scene. Previous episodes of “Assad gassing his own people” had occurred in rebel-held territory inaccessible to journalists; we “learned” of these episodes through the testimony of the White Helmets, which was transcribed and conveyed to us by Western “journalists” as if it were Holy Scripture, and treated by the OPCW as credible reportage.